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Continue the gun conversation

By Sheila Durkin Dierks

Posted:
06/16/2013 01:00:00 AM MDT

In the early afternoon, June 23, 1971, I stepped from my sister's Chevrolet onto the sidewalk in a strip of stores in suburban Cincinnati. Turning to enter the drugstore, I was confronted by a teenage boy with a gun in his right hand. It was pointed directly at me. Maybe five feet away. Waist high. My sister screamed, I leapt for the car, and the intended target, another teen, took the moment to flee. Who could forget such a moment?

I realized later that I came close to becoming another sad statistic in the Cincinnati record books.

As I watch the continued unfolding of the gun conversation, it seems that we concentrate on the tragic matter of mass murders, with names like Newtown and Aurora, movie theatres and grade schools. The media are mesmerized by large numbers of innocents dead, by the name and number of weapons and the collection of large capacity magazines found at the scene.

Altogether though, these are rare occurrences.

It may be that we are concentrating our attention in the wrong place. A far greater number of lives have been taken, ruined, forever wounded one or two victims at a time.

As we read the papers, watch cable news, we see almost daily the loss of a life in an accidental shooting. We cringe at the heartbreak of a young child who shoots his younger sibling with a Cricket, an actual gun for children, which is loaded and leaning in a corner of the living room. We hear of domestic violence deaths, random shootings on a street, an argument at a filling station, a shot coming from a car window, through a front window, from a fire escape. Last week a U.S. Special Forces vet, Justin Stanfield Thomas, was killed by his four-year-old son who picked up a handgun from the top of a TV set, asked his dad, "What's this?" and pulled the trigger.

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These shootings, either accidental, or not directly targeted, are responsible for many more injuries and deaths than the targeted Aurora, or Santa Monica events.

We are beginning to realize that this is most often not a bad guy with a gun being challenged by a good guy with a gun. It frequently is a matter of one licensed gun owner who is careful, making sure a gun is not loaded, storing ammunition away separately, putting it away safely and out of the reach of curious children, and another licensed gun owner who is careless, even momentarily, leaving a loaded gun in view, in reach, and easily grabbed when anger or curiosity or alcohol make the gun attractive.

We all remember the Boulder case when a young woman was killed, shot through the wall of her apartment kitchen while eating pizza at her kitchen table, by a man cleaning his gun in the next unit, at his kitchen table, who had not checked to see if it was loaded.

These events are not the stories of criminals but of every day people like each of you reading this article.

If we reframe the discussion as one of public safety and responsibility we as a community might come to some common, useful agreements. The agreements do not have to do with having a gun or not having one.

There continues to be a significant and prudent reason to license weapons as we do cars. One national registry, with a reasonably priced license which will be available on a local level, will, like car registration/driver licensing, allow some prudent guidelines which will promote public safety. A registry will allow for owner-identification across state lines of guns that are found, misused, or have been treated irresponsibly.

We need to make sure that everyone who wishes to buy a gun receives adequate training to carry a gun safely. Just as drivers have age restrictions, and are required to conquer and keep skills, so might gun owners be required to learn for the common good.

Once the gun has been purchased and the owner trained, there need to be laws for misuse/negligence. There need to be penalties for carelessness, penalties that carry weight, in which loss of use of the gun might be part, as well as fines, even incarceration if a life is lost. Loan a gun to a friend and it gets used in a robbery? Leave a loaded gun on a table to be picked up by a curious child? Have a gun taken from the seat of the car which is used then in a drive-by or domestic argument? Just as we as citizens have the right and the expectation of being informed of and protected from a drunk driver, or a toxic spill, we have the right to hope that we will not be shot by a careless owner/borrower.

As the second amendment promises, we have the right to a "well-ordered" group of gun owners. We all, in our lives in the public or the private sphere, hope that we have some reasonable right to safety from our sister and brother gun owners. We certainly have a right to expect a group who are not in themselves mortally dangerous to others around them.

Since Newtown happened in December, nearly 5,000 people in the U.S., have died in gun violence. Some accidents, some deliberate, all fatal.

Just as we might ask what a prudent gun owner might do, we also might wonder the same about prudent non-armed citizens. What should we all, in wisdom and courage, do now?

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